How to download from Usenet

I am writing this “tutorial” on usenet because a lot of people ask me where i find all my films and videogames and music etc. in so little time.

Well… I am now ready to reveal this secret… the “secret of how Riqz downloads from the interwebz.

You might say “Riqz, we use emule no?” or “maybe it’ll be one of those old rapidshare methods…BORING!” but no. Here we talk about Usenet.

What is Usenet? When the internet started all that people would mostly use were newsgroups. Inside these newsgroups people would talk about everything, they were the predecessors of “modern” forums. A person would “subscribe” to a News Service Provider (NSP from now on) and this would let him or her use their servers to read and write about music, film or even more specific things such as photography, medicine and any other imaginable hobby or job.

Let’s get to the point… After a period of time these NSPs let users add files to their posts. Images, text files etc. This evolved into binary newsgroups, a newsgroup that dealt exclusively with files.

This evolution brings us to how we know and use Usenet nowadays to download whatever we need.

I’ll state beforehand that this is not a free service like Torrents (even if there are private torrent trackers that also require payment) or like emule.
Then what is the advantage of using Usenet you may ask?

The first and most important advantage is that you pay for a service and therefore you will download at the maximum speed that your Internet Provider can handle. For example if you have a 3Mbit internet connection you will download at speeds of around 393kb/second. If you have a 13Mbit connection like me, you will download at 1.7Mbytes/second (yeah you heard that right: one point seven MEGABYTES per second).

This has spoiled me a bit since I don’t even watch films in standard definition anymore (usually 700Mb size) but only in HD (they vary in size from 4-6 gigs for a 720p file up to 15 gigs for 1080p files).

So how do I do this?

Here’s the explanation:

1) You need a subscription to an NSP. I can recommend UsenetServer that gives you a 14 day trial. It costs 10 dollars a month ( a great price and you can find that offer HERE . You can also pay less by subscribing for a whole year.). If you want to do a trial period with a Gigabyte subscription method there’s Newshosting that for any subscription you choose gives you a trial of up to 30GB to download. Another valid NSP is Easynews that offers a trial of 14 days and/or 10GB to download. A more recent NSP that only costs €4.43 a month (incredible price) is XLNED (speed is limited to 10mbits). Once you’ve subscribed they will send you an email with the login details you chose. Write these down on a piece of paper because you will need them further on. They will give you a server address that for UsenetServer will be “secure.usenetserver.com” (ssl encrypted for more security).

2) Now you need a program that enables you to download the files that are extrapolated from the .nzb files (think of these like .torrent files). I recommend using Alt.Binz and I will use this program in this tutorial. Download and install it. Download also Winrar if you don’t have it already (it is needed to unzip .rar or .zip files) and also QuickPar (this one is needed to repair .rar files if they are broken or badly downloaded). Install everything. Once all this is done proceed to step 3.

3) Open Alt.Binz and click on Setup. In the “Download” section choose where you want to save the downloaded files.

In the “NZB” section remove all flags from the options “Import as Paused”

In the “Servers” section, under “Name” write the name you want to give your server (i put UsenetServer SSL). In the “Address” field put secure.usenetserver.com. Flag “Server requires authentication” and write your username and password that you wrote on your piece of paper. Put “number of Connections” 2o and “Port” 563 and at this point click on “add as primary”.

4) Now that you have added your server details let’s keep updating some options. On “Par2” section flag everything except “recheck all PAR2 sets on start”

5) Alt.Binz program is now ready to download. Close the program. Now we need to find something do download. You can use a free “Search Engine” called Binsearch. On Binsearch you can search anything that exists on Usenet (nearly everything but no need to go into that right now). An easier option are indexing websites. They aggregate all the files that you saw on Binsearch and create an .NZB file that you can download into Alt.Binz and it will know what files to download automatically. On NzbIndex we can find these files easily. Let’s say I want to download an episode of How I met your Mother. Here it is. We can click on the episode we want and check the box next to the file description. Click on the “download button. This will download the .NZB file that will automatically open in Alt.Binz which will then start downloading the episode you chose. Unfortunately on Binsearch, by searching a film name or tv series you rarely find the complete file. This is is because NSP sometimes deletes files from there servers. To stop this from happening uploaders stopped putting the name of the series or film in their uploads. Here’s where indexing sites come in. My favourite is NZBGRABIT. Here, users upload their NZB files telling everyone what it really is (for example they might have uploaded a file called 111222333.rar but on the indexing site they will upload the NZB with the name “How I met your mother S03E01”).

Registration to NZBGrabit is free. Once registered you can already search and download .NZB that have been uploaded in the last 5 days for free, when you donate 10 GBP (it’s really worth it) you can download everything whenever you want forever. This is definetly my go to website to find .NZB files. If you need an invite or if there is any problem comment under this post and i’ll try to sort it out for you.

I hope this guide has been useful in understanding what Usenet is and how to download from it. It can be very confusing and daunting at first but I hope you will change your downloading ways and steer clear from Torrents and Emule.

If you need any help, troubleshooting or questions don’t hesitate to ask in the comment section.

Also very important:

Downloading copyrighted material on the internet that you don’t already own is illegal and I do not condone or push you to do so in any way. Uploading and downloading any copyrighted material on any filesharing system is illegal. Users that download through programs or techniques described on this article is responsible to verify the free and legal distribution (public domain or authorised to do so) of the files that they are downloading.

Have fun everyone!

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This guide is property and copyright of Riqz. Ask for permission before posting it anywhere else!